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📊WordPress 5.5 Core Stats: contributions by country & company

WordPress 5.5 « Eckstine » was released as expected on August 11, 2020. This is a very particular version for me, as I had the pleasure to be involved in the release squad as Accessibility Tech Lead. I also co-led one of the three major features of WP 5.5: plugins and themes auto-updates.

In the past, I already published some contributions stats for versions 5.3 and 5.4. I did it again for WP 5.5, so we can have an eye on the influence of countries and companies on WordPress Core.

Before diving into WordPres 5.5 Core contributions stats, few disclaimers, for better context:

  • With Sergey Biryukov and Jonathan Desrosiers, we worked on putting “props” (credits) together in a spreadsheet to generate the credits list of WordPress 5.5. Then, I parsed WordPress.org profiles pages for each contributor to get some public informations about the contributors: country, employer, and wether they already contributed to WordPress Core or not. It includes both Core contributions on Trac and Gutenberg pull requests on GitHub.
  • Those stats are based on what’s declared in each contributors’s wp.org profile. Users with empty profile informations are not taken into account.
  • All the charts and raw data can be downloaded below.

✨General statistics: WP 5.5 broke many records!

805 people contributed to WordPress 5.5, which is a new record! Those contributors come from more than 58 different countries, and from more than 215 different companies.

More importantly, 306 people made their very first contribution to WordPress Core. In WordPress 5.5 source code, we have around 38% of new contributors!

This is without doubt the more important stats of this post, as it proves the dynamism and the health of the WordPress open-source project.

For reference, there were 32% of new contributors in WP 5.4.

🌍Total Contributors (people) by Country

This chart shows the number of people who contributed to WordPress 5.5 sorted by country.

On the 58 countries (48 for WP 5.4) that contributed to WP 5.5, USA has the biggest amount of contributors (164), followed by India (48 contributors), UK (31), France –weeeheee!– with 25 contributors (our new record!) and Canada with 23 contributors.

Worth noting a bigger number of contributors from Africa or South/Central America than in previous releases. You’ll see later that it is even more important when we take the number of contributions instead of the number of contributors.

Here is the evolution of the top 10 between WP 5.3, WP 5.4 et WP 5.5.

WordPress 5.3 WordPress 5.4 WordPress 5.5 
CountryPeopleCountryPeopleCountryPeople
USA110USA99 ✅USA164 ✅
India63India48 ✅India48 ✅
UK26Germany20 📈UK 31 📈
Germany22UK18 📉France25 📈
Netherlands21France15 📈Canada23 📈
Australia14Canada11 📈Netherlands 22 📈
Canada13Netherlands11 📉Germany 15 📉
France11Bangladesh9 📈Japan 15 📈
Italia9Italia8 ✅Espagne 13 📈
Japan8Japan8 ✅Australia 12 📈

🌍Total Contributions (tickets credits) by Country

If we count all props credited (Trac tickets + GitHub issues), the results are slightly different.

USA are still number one with 1170 contributions, but followed by Russia with 626 contributions (notably led by Sergey, who is the biggest individual contributor of this release). Then, we have UK with 207 contributions and Algeria with 200 contributions. Special shout out to Riad Benguella, one of the Gutenberg lead developers. In the rest of the top 10, we have Poland, Germany, Canada, Australia and France.

👩‍💻Number of WordPress 5.5 Core Contributors (people) by Company

On the 215 companies that contributed to WordPress 5.5, Automattic has by far the biggest number of Core Contributors, with 82 employees credited in 5.5. Twelve other companies have more than 3 employees credited: Yoast and Whodunit – my employer – with 10 people, Human Made and WP Engine with 8 contributors, Google and rtCamp with 6 people, WPMU Dev (5) and Bluehost, GoDaddy, iThemes et Audrey HC (4).

However, you’ll see later that those figures are slightly different in terms of number of contributions.

👨🏾‍💻Total Core Contributions (ticket credits) by Employer

Automattic is the more prolific company with 1497 contributions, but Yoast is also HUGE with 718 contributions.

Worth noting that the following major stakeholders can be categorized in three sorts of companies: agencies, plugins/themes editors and hosting companies (and… Google).

After Automattic et Yoast, we have the following ranking: the Bluehost hosting company (189 contributions), three agencies: Required (133), Whodunit (108) and Human Made (89), the iThemes editor (88) and Google (81).

🌿Top WordPress 5.5 individual contributors

Here is the list of WordPress 5.5 contributors with more than 10 contributions:

NameContributionsCountryCompany
SergeyBiryukov619RussiaYoast
youknowriad197AlgeriaAutomattic
whyisjake197United StatesAutomattic / WordPress VIP
aduth172United StatesAutomattic
gziolo138PolandAutomattic
ocean90130Germanyrequired
desrosj130United StatesBluehost
ellatrix104Bulgaria
audrasjb97FranceWhodunit
talldanwp79AustraliaAutomattic
afercia79ItalyYoast
TimothyBlynJacobs77United StatesiThemes
jorgefilipecosta75PortugalAutomattic
johnbillion65United KingdomHuman Made Ltd
azaozz63CanadaAutomattic
epiqueras54Peru
swissspidy54SwitzerlandGoogle
zebulan48
nosolosw47SpainAutomattic
joen42DenmarkAutomattic
zieladam42Poland
ianbelanger41United StatesBluehost
itsjonq37CanadaAutomattic
sergioestevao35United KingdomAutomattic
andraganescu35RomaniaAutomattic
pbiron35United StatesSparrow Hawk Computing
mkaz33United StatesAutomattic
noisysocks32AustraliaAutomattic
noahtallen31
spacedmonkey31United KingdomSpacedmonkey
garrett-eclipse29CanadaSendtoNews Incorporated
happiryu28
dd3226
sabernhardt26United States
ramiy26Israel
davidbaumwald26United StatesDream Encode
isabel_brison25
ryelle25United StatesAutomattic
mukesh2725India
geriux24
hazdiego24
nrqsnchz23MexicoAutomattic
afragen23United StatesGitHub Updater
brentswisher22United States
dratwas21
jonsurrell21SpainAutomattic
soean21GermanyParship Group
bernhard-reiter20Automattic
dufresnesteven20Automattic
stevenlinx20
donmhico18PhilippinesWebDevStudios
ajlende17United States
mcsf17PortugalAutomattic
dlh17Alley
get_dave16United KingdomAutomattic
jbinda16
earnjam16United StatesBluehost
kjellr16Automattic
ayeshrajans16
peterwilsoncc16Australia
addiestavlo15
mikeschroder15JapanGoDaddy
glendaviesnz14
vindl14
poena14SwedenThemes By Carolina
Clorith14NorwayDekode Interaktiv AS
sainthkh13
matveb13SpainAutomattic
snapfractalpop13
birgire13Iceland
chipsnyder12
ntsekouras12
pmbaldha12India
Toro_Unit12JapanHAMWORKS Co., Ltd.
hareesh-pillai12India
jrf12NetherlandsAdvies en zo
ceyhun?10
mattchowning10
shaunandrews10United StatesAutomattic
pento10Australia
karmatosed10United KingdomAutomattic
joemcgill10United StatesAlley Interactive
Chouby10
samful10United Kingdom
joedolson10United StatesAccessible Web Design
jorbin10United StatesPenske Media Corporation

🎁Download charts & data

All those resources are shared under Creative Commons BY-SA, which means you are free to use it on your blog or website with proper attribution (and maybe a link to this page?).

If you want to support this initiative, you can buy me a beer 🍺 or leave a kind comment below 🥰 

WP 5.5 credits – Countries by peopleDownload SVG
WP 5.5 credits – Countries by contributionsDownload SVG
WP 5.5 credits – Companies by peopleDownload SVG
WP 5.5 credits – Companies by contributionsDownload SVG

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